Singer’s Blunt Statement on Welfare Queens Goes Viral, Lands Her in Hot Water

Nearly six years ago a new hip hop artist named Chapter Jackson, real name LaToya Hicks, burst onto the music scene with an album that most people simply didn’t know how to react to.

Chapter’s first track, titled “It’s Free Swipe Yo EBT,” seemingly documented in a absurd, explicit and incredibly raunchy manner how Californians could use and abuse the state’s welfare programs with relative ease, but was widely dismissed as being tasteless satire or an offensive mockery of black culture.

In an interview a short time after her track went viral on YouTube, Chapter sat down for an interview in which she explained how California’s wide variety of taxpayer-funded welfare programs and Electronic Benefits Transfer cards were gamed by those who understand how the system actually works.

The most telling part of the interview is her final remark, in which she asked, “I mean, who would want to work in America? This is what the taxpayers are paying for.”

The liberal-leaning fact-checkers at Snopes addressed the controversy over Chapter’s song and ultimately rated it as a “mixture” of truth and lies, as they couldn’t legitimately deny that the singer’s assertions were true, only drawing the line at whether she had actually had personal experience gaming the system or was advocating for others to do so.

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In a separate part of the interview, when asked specifically about her reaction to the song going viral, Chapter stated, “When I put that song out I just thought people would laugh about it. I never imagined that the type of backlash that has occurred would even take place.”

“I came up with the idea to paint a picture to people as an exaggeration,” she continued. “The song is actually a reflection of my childhood in that my mother had multiple kids and was abusing government assistance.”

“I’m definitely not judging anybody and I don’t hold any resentment toward my mother, but I want people to know that you have to treat your kids with respect, not just like a paycheck,” she added. “You never know, one day that child might grow up and write a song about it.”

In the end, Snopes ultimately decided that Chapter’s song should be classified as “satire,” a form of literary or performance art in which “vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement. Although satire is usually meant to be funny, its greater purpose is often constructive social criticism, using wit as a weapon.”